Six Ars staffers, four days, one new Apple product—inside is everything you …

For those committed to entering mass amounts of text on the iPad, you have the option of using Apple's keyboard dock or a regular dock and a Bluetooth keyboard. For the purposes of this review, we did the latter, using Apple's generic $30 iPad dock and an Apple wireless keyboard that we had paired with another computer.

Pairing the keyboard is easily done through the Settings app on the iPad. From there, the keyboard can be used to enter text into anything, from a tweet to a full-blown book in something like the Notes app or Pages. But what's cool—and very surprising—about using a Bluetooth keyboard is that the iPad accepts a number of keyboard commands that we expected to be reserved for "real" computers. We're referring to things like command+A to select all, command+C to copy, and more.

Additionally, if you're using an Apple keyboard, the keyboard's other functions can control various aspects of the iPad. For example, the keyboard's brightness buttons can bump the iPad's screen brightness up or down, the volume buttons can change the iPad's speaker volume, the keyboard's music player controls can manipulate the iPod app, and so on. We were excited to discover this functionality; it makes the iPad a bit more computer-like when the need arises, and such attention to detail is appreciated. Still, we don't see ourselves doing this often except in an emergency—say, we're called upon to cover some breaking news while on vacation with nothing but our iPads. (Hey, it has happened before, but with no iPads.)

One observation we have about this kind of usage is that the hardware keyboard puts our brains into "normal computer mode," and that's not how the iPad works.

You can't scroll a webpage in Safari using the keyboard, for example, and your first inclination after that is to reach out for a mouse—which isn't there—or tap your space, arrow, or page up and down keys—which don't work. If you start typing an address in Safari and it offers you suggestions, you can't use the arrow keys to select the right choice. If you're posting a long and beleaguered response to a forum thread (someone on the Internet is wrong!), you can't page through the thread from the keyboard. Furthermore, the special nature of Safari seems to break applications that implement paging using key press events (e.g.The Boston Globe's Big Picture, ffffound, or the Tumblr dashboard) to page through items. There seems to be, at this moment, absolutely no good way to use an external keyboard to navigate a webpage on the iPad. The one caveat we found was that you can tab between form elements using the tab key in Mobile Safari. This was the exception to the rule, however.

So if you want to get around the Internet in Safari, you have to reach out with your hand and touch the screen to select things—this feels a bit unnatural. Imagine if you were using your desktop computer with a regular keyboard but had no way to navigate other than to touch a screen that may not even be all that close to you. Granted, we found that this becomes more and more second-nature as time goes on, and it's likely that, after a few weeks, it would be less of an issue. Still, having a hardware keyboard definitely forces you to interact with the iPad in a different way, and we're not entirely sure that's a good thing.

Another slight annoyance is that you can't switch between the two keyboards (hardware and software) easily. If the iPad is paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, the on-screen keyboard won't show up if you decide to pick up the iPad and use it in your lap. You can make the software keyboard appear by hitting the eject key on the external keyboard, but that's only useful if the external keyboard is within reach. Otherwise, you must first turn off Bluetooth or un-pair the keyboard if you want to use the on-screen keyboard.

Another great feature of using the external keyboard is that you can input characters that are impossible using the software keyboard. You can type all manner of special characters by holding down the option and/or shift keys as well as build accented characters in the exact same way you would on your Mac. The only problem we ran into is that most apps, even some built for the iPad, don't take into account the ability to accept control characters. Just for some example, later in this article we attempted to use iSSH to connect to a remote server, control a screen session, and edit some files in vim. This was more or less impossible using just the keyboard, as the application's developer likely never considered that someone could input ctrl+a or use a tab key to try and auto-complete a path.

Universal Apps versus iPad apps versus iPhone apps

Left is what it looks like when you launch an iPhone-only app on the iPad. Right is when you blow it up to 2x. Trust us: when you see it in person, the blown up app looks much more pixelated.

The app situation on the iPad is great—there are a ton of apps available, and new ones are added daily. It's also somewhat confusing, to say the least. Doubly so if you already own another iPhone OS device.

There are iPad apps, iPhone/iPod touch apps, and "Universal" apps. All three will run on your iPad, but iPhone apps are not very pleasant to use. iPhone apps are designed for the iPhone's much smaller screen, and will show up as such when you launch them on the iPad (see above image). There's a button in the lower right-hand corner that lets you blow up the interface to 2x size, and that does exactly what you would imagine: it makes the app twice as big and twice as pixelated. So iPhone apps work on the iPad, but you will definitely find yourself thinking "Wow, there had better be an iPad counterpart for this."

Then there are iPad-only apps which, as you can guess, are designed specifically for the iPad and will not work on the iPhone. A large majority of these apps are designed differently from their iPhone counterparts, mostly to make use of the larger screen space. Finally, there are Universal apps, which are apps that will run at the native size on both an iPhone and an iPad. That is, if you buy a single Universal application and sync it to your iPhone, it will behave as intended on a smaller iPhone screen. If you sync it with an iPad, it will appear full-screen there and take advantage of the iPad's real estate with whatever extra features the developer chose to add. You know it's a Universal app in the App Store because there's a little plus sign next to it.

Some—but not all—developers have wisely chosen to name their iPad-only apps something different than their iPhone-only apps (usually by appending an "HD" or an "XL" or "for iPad" to the end of the application's name). Why does this matter? Because if you own an iPhone and an iPad and you have downloaded apps from the same company for both devices, you have to figure out which is which when you sync them in iTunes. When syncing one of our iPads for this review, we ended up with "NPR" and "NPR News" on our computers and had no way to tell from the computer which one was the iPad-specific app and which wasn't—so we synced both and hoped for the best. (By the way, "NPR News" is the iPhone app.) We fully expect the naming issue to change over time as more developers realize that this is a problem, but for now, it can be frustrating.